Snowflake said Wednesday that CEO Frank Slootman, 65, is retiring, and will be replaced by former Google ad chief Sridhar Ramaswamy. The shares plunged 20% in extended trading.
Ramaswamy, 57, spent 15 years at Google, most recently leading Ads and Commerce until 2018. He then left to co-found Neeva in 2019, a consumer search engine he hoped to rival Google until last year, when he announced he was shutting it down.
Snowflake acquired Neeva in June for $185 million, according to a filing.
“There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning,” Slootman said in a statement. “He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses.”
Snowflake also released its fourth-quarter financial results, in which sales grew 32% year-over-year to $774.7 million in the period. Product revenue for the first quarter was $738.1 million, which was a 33% increase from the previous year.
The company said that guidance for product revenue in the first quarter would come in between $745 million to $750 million, lower than the $759 million that analysts were expecting. Additionally, Snowflake said that first-quarter adjusted operating margin would be 3%, topping analyst estimates of 7.2%.
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Jennifer Elias and Jordan Novet contributed reporting
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